This blog contains all my media, marketing and digital columns written for the Eastern Daily Press newspaper, the biggest selling regional morning newspaper in England. I hope you enjoy.

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

The beauty of basic business principles

This week I had the pleasure of
hosting the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce “be better online” conference. Around
100 delegates from businesses across Norfolk and from numerous market segments
descended to the Forum. All with the aim of learning some new tips and
techniques that would help them improve what they were doing online and give
them what all businesses want: an edge over their competitors.

As well as being an honour to host
these events, I too sat with the rest of the delegates writing notes and picking
up ideas that I could bring back to Archant towers and implement. I was not
unduly surprised that from the varied speakers talking about such subjects as
content marketing, search, social and email marketing there emerged some common
but essential principles.

Too often companies undertake
activities, especially online, without any goals or KPIs to check against. “We
do social because we ought to” is not a reason. Have a proper plan with targets
and goals and measure yourself against them and don’t be afraid to change if you
don’t hit them.

Make sure you understand what your
customers are doing on your own sites. For example it could be that your
audience arrive on your site not on the homepage but a different landing page
but unless you check your analytics data you cannot use that knowledge to your
advantage. While you are doing that you should also make a point of
understanding what your competitors are doing and see if you can do it better or
differently!

Use content in its different forms
to show people how great you are, don’t tell them. Use your own product and
market experience to set yourself apart from your competitors. Finally a theme
across all the day was my old favourite that applies to everything: test, learn
and refine.

These simple rules may seem like
common sense but are often forgotten by businesses. The value of a conference is
not always in what is said but the chance to remove you from the rush of modern
working and remind yourself that basic principles apply just as much to the
digital world as to the offline world and arguably more
so.

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About Me

My name is Tim Youngman, I am director of marketing for a regional newspaper group in the UK.
This blog contains the columns I write on media, marketing and technology for the Eastern Daily Press newspaper in the UK www.edp24.co.uk England's largest selling regional morning newspaper.
You can find our more about me here:
www.linkedin.com/in/timyoungman
and follow me on twitter @timyoungman